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In Memoriam: Thomas E. Hill, Jr. (1937-2026) (MOVING TO FRONT FROM JULY 22–READERS WHO MISSED IT MAY ENJOY THE SPLENDID TRIBUTES TO PROFESSOR HILL IN THE COMMENTS)

Brian Leiter

Professor Hill was a leading moral philosopher, known especially for his work on Kantian ethics. He was emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he taught from 1984 until his retirement in 2017 (he taught at UCLA from 1968 until his move to Chapel Hill). Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Hill or for those who would like to comment on the significance of his work.

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13 responses to “In Memoriam: Thomas E. Hill, Jr. (1937-2026) (MOVING TO FRONT FROM JULY 22–READERS WHO MISSED IT MAY ENJOY THE SPLENDID TRIBUTES TO PROFESSOR HILL IN THE COMMENTS)”

  1. James C. Klagge

    I mainly knew Tom during his last several years at UCLA, but in addition to his many intellectual virtues, he was perhaps the kindest, gentlest philosopher I’ve known.

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  2. Ian Cruise

    As a person, Tom beautifully exemplified the Kantian precept to value humanity. Many in the philosophical community will know about his work and its significance. Perhaps fewer will know about the pivotal role he had in shaping UNC Philosophy’s culture, which has, for many years, had a reputation for being a congenial place to do philosophy. I’m sure many of his former students will attest that he was extremely supportive. His encouragement about a paper I wrote for one of his classes led me to start submitting my work to conferences and the like, and at a time when I felt a bit philosophically aimless. He helped get me back on track. I’m very glad to have known him.

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  3. Matt Lister

    I’d only met Hill a couple of times, and in group settings, so while I liked him a lot and thought he was very nice, I can’t say I knew him well. But, I was, and am, a very big fan of his work. Pretty much everything I’ve read by him I’ve found useful, careful, and intersting, but I’ll note in particular that he did a great job of showing how Kant’s thought, and Kantian approaches more generally, can be useful and important for thinking about things like disability and race, topics where it was often claimed to be of no or negative use. I think his work on these topics, and others, will be worth going back to for a long time.

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  4. Richard Galvin

    Today we lost one of the finest persons in our profession. He was a truly warm human being, kind, generous and welcoming. I was never Tom’s “student” ( didn’t go to UCLA or UNC) but I did get to spend the summer of ’93 at NC with 11 other people, who had some claim to being engaged in Kant scholarship, at a NEH summer seminar. It was 8 weeks, 4 days a week, three hours in the seminar meeting, and then virtually every day many of us would head to the Lenoir cafeteria for lunch. That often lasted more than three hours as well. It was, to be sure, the graduate seminar I never had the opportunity to participate in when I was a graduate student. Tom chose great people–there were no greenhorns, and we all brought something to the table. And he wasn’t there to shove his views down our throats–he was there as a teacher and (just as important) as a learner. One of the remarkable things about Tom was his ability to try to push us even further than we might be comfortable going without being threatening or domineering. His influence on me as both a teacher and as scholar was immeasurable. We also developed what amounted to a more than thirty year friendship. I will also say that having come to know a number of his former students over the years, that he left his mark on them as well. He was (of course) a top tier Kant scholar, but he was much more than that. And I am grateful for having been his friend and student. I will miss him dearly as, I’m sure, will countless others.

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    1. Larry Krasnoff

      As another of the participants in that 1993 NEH summer seminar, I can attest to everything that Richard Galvin says here. It was a great group and Tom led it so well without seeming to break any sweat at all. He let everyone do their thing, such that you could easily forget that it was all working because he was at the center of it all.

      Tom was sneaky like that. With Kant, most everyone starts with the default assumption that this is a forbidding theoretical apparatus constructed by a remote intellectual force. You then have to do a ton of work to explain and defend the theory, or to cut Kant down for trying and failing to realize such grandiose theoretical ambition.

      If you pick up a Tom Hill paper, the basic sense you get is that Kant was a good guy who was just trying to explain how we can all be good people together.

      But if you start poking at the argument, asking whether the moral reality or the Kantian position can really be as straightforward as that, you quickly see how much control Tom had over all the hard stuff. He was sneaky like that. Pay closer attention to the ways Tom frames his claims, and you will see that he was always defending a particular way of reading Kant, against a battery of textual and moral objections. But somehow those objections never came to dominate the narrative, which always kept its determinedly positive focus on what was so sweet and reasonable in Kant. That determinedly positive focus, of course, was Tom’s real achievement. As Karen Stohr says here, Tom never said that you had to read the text his way. He always said that you might want to read it his way…and why would you not want the text to be sweet and reasonable?

      You see, Tom was modeling being a good person in the way he argued, philosophically. But he wasn’t being at all sneaky there, because Tom genuinely was a throughly good person. I am finding it difficult to convey what a total sweetheart he was. Everyone in these comments is saying it, everything they are saying is true, and somehow it is not enough. It is not adequate to the reality of Tom’s kindness and generosity.

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  5. Samuel Reis-Dennis

    I was Tom Hill’s student at UNC from 2011-2017. He supervised my master’s thesis and was the second reader on my dissertation committee. As a mentor, Tom gently offered a wealth of quiet suggestions and deep insights while helping me to find my own style. He was deliberate, sensitive, and understated; he did not take short-cuts; he did not make a big show of reaching a Big Conclusion. Learning from him required patience, open-mindedness, and humility. He was a life-changing teacher.

    When I entered the PhD program, just out of college at age 22, I think I mostly saw philosophy as a negative undertaking: one lies in wait for others to futilely build theories and then bombards them with an onslaught of devastating counterexamples. Tom’s vision of philosophy was so much brighter and more expansive. Although he appreciated and affirmed the value of fair competition (he was a successful wrestler and played offensive line for Harvard), he warned me of the pitfalls of conceiving of philosophy in metaphors of war. Indeed, he reminded his seminar students at the beginning of every semester that philosophy was not easy, and he invited us to see what kind of progress we could make if we pursued its great questions collaboratively and as equals.

    Developing the courage and ability to articulate my own ethical outlook took time. One day, feeling frustrated, I showed up at Tom’s office hours to ask why he, someone who respected and had once been gripped by ordinary language philosophy, was so invested in positive, theoretical work. What good could it possibly do? Tom did not belittle my question, nor did he betray any disappointment or frustration. Instead, he tenderly and hopefully explained how good philosophy might retain its theoretical aspirations while being honest about its limits. “People take theories and use them to change the world,” he said.

    Tom’s prose models the qualities he encouraged in his students. His writing is clear, charitable, and expressive of an exceptional sense of what matters. While his philosophy begins, as he wrote in the introduction to Autonomy and Self-Respect, “with genuine puzzlement,” it never reduces the philosopher to a cheap puzzle-solver. His work makes his grand themes—respect, equality, human dignity—urgent and accessible without draining them of their power to inspire. It reflects a Kantian vision, of course, but, like Tom, it is also distinctively American, even (and especially) in its criticism of American bigotry and war. Reading Tom’s writing made me a less cynical person, deepening my understanding of our highest values and renewing my commitment to them.

    I was lucky not only to learn from Tom, but also to become his friend. During my first week in Chapel Hill, Tom and his wife, Robin, welcomed me by inviting me to join a group of his students that met regularly for dim sum. Through those meals, as well as trips to the symphony, discussions of his football days, and hours in his classes, I came to delight in Tom’s subtle and warm sense of humor in addition to his famous bigheartedness.

    When Tom retired, he generously agreed to participate in a reading group with Vida Yao (another former UNC student) and me that we convened over Zoom for years until his recent health issues and our busy schedules made it impossible. In these meetings, we tried to draw out Tom-the-teacher but he insisted, predicably, on a more egalitarian arrangement. He almost always refused to select texts for us but gamely read everything we assigned—often the work of some of Kant’s fiercest critics. Rather than defensively attempting to undermine these detractors, Tom approached every session with an open mind. Mostly, he wanted us to do the talking, interjecting from time to time to lightly steer us in more fruitful directions or to share amusing anecdotes of the characters he encountered as a younger philosopher at Oxford, Harvard, and UCLA.

    I relished those sessions and I will cherish my memories of them along with my memories of working with Tom as a student. He was a wonderful philosopher and friend who enriched my life immeasurably. I will miss him.

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  6. Stephen Darwall

    Tom was both a wonderful philosopher and human being. I remember first getting to know him when he spent a year at the National Humanities Center during my last year at Chapel Hill. We had numerous conversations, and he was unfailingly kind, but tenacious. I’ll never forget when I saw Tom along with David Falk and a couple of other UNC faculty members heading to lunch the day after I told David that I was going to Michigan. The wheels were turning that day.

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  7. Daniel Layman

    Tom was a member of my dissertation committee at UNC, where I received my PhD in 2014. Even though I was working on Locke rather than on Kant or anything else directly in his wheelhouse, Tom never tired of reading my work and providing feedback that was at once supportive and rigorous. He was also a wonderful mentor beyond the office and the seminar room. Once, early in my time in Chapel Hill, Tom overheard me talking about music and invited me to attend a symphony performance in Durham, just down the road. I don’t remember much about the performance, but I do remember how it felt to be treated as a friend and equal by a giant in my field when I was still very green. For these reasons and many more, I’m grateful to have known Tom. He will be missed.

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  8. Andrew Courtwright

    In one of my UNC graduate seminars with Tom, a classmate remarked that cotemporary Kantians seemed interested in Kant only insofar as it allowed them to attack neo-Humeans. Tom replied with an analogy he ascribed to Isaiah Berlin. Berlin, said Tom, thought of intellectual positions—rationalism, non-cognitivism, realism—as citadels. Some philosophers occupy the fortress and expend their cognitive power lobbing arguments against other citadels, trying to pound them into intellectual dust. Others develop formidable defensive weapons with complex and ingenious responses to actual and possible objections to their doctrines, thereby deflecting attack. But, Berlin said, the inner fortress—the vision of life for the sake of which battles are waged—usually turns out to be relatively simple and unsophisticated.

    For me, Tom’s “Autonomy and Self-Respect” and each subsequent collection of essays and lectures was work that makes Kant’s inner fortress not just complex and sophisticated but fundamentally livable. Or, I should say—to borrow one of Tom’s favorite disclaimers—maybe not Kant’s own inner fortress but a Kantian one.

    Tom managed to make what is usually thought of as cold and distant philosophical territory into a place to reside. Although I am a physician now and rarely lean on my doctoral work with Tom, it is a testament to him that, when I am considering ethical concerns in the hospital, I am rarely launching a catapult at a far-off enemy. Rather, I’m trying to do the normative work needed to keep up the place.

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  9. Carl Cranor, Distinguished Professor Emeritus; Universitiy of California, Riverside

    Thomas E. Hill died in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on July22, 2026. What follows are some remembrances of his major philosophic influences and on my personal life.
    In 1968 Tom Hill joined the UCLA faculty, having recently taught at Pomona College. He seemed to easily appeal to graduate students, perhaps because of his personality or his area of expertise on Immanual Kant or both. Numerous UCLA students were his first Ph.D.s, including Jan Boxill, Bernie Boxill and Carl Cranor. Many others soon followed.
    However, his influence was not merely academic as many became lifelong friends. He played badminton with some, tennis with others and some faculty members, and pickup basketball on occasion. He assisted in the organization of a philosophy and law discussion group that lurched a bit at the beginning, but soon took on a comparatively permanent and routine structure as the Southern California Law and Philosophy Discussion Group, with numerous faculty from UCLA, USC, and other philosophy or law departments with initial UCLA leadership and then passing on that leadership until 2025, when it was retired. Ultimately, he left UCLA to join the University of North Carolina philosophy faculty and to be closer to his family and his aging father. He quickly became a member of a similar discussion group in North Carolina.
    His connection with UCLA students was revealed when he purchased a new house with a yard needing cleanup and improvement. Five or six students, recognizing his needs spent most of a Saturday removing noxious plants (bamboo) and helping him shape his backyard, followed by a dinner with Tom and Robin (whom he married while at UCLA) in the evening.
    Despite Tom’s new geographical location in Chapel Hill, he remained in touch with many of his UCLA students as well as new ones from UNC. Quite impressively, at Chapel Hill from time to time he and Robin would rent a large house on the North Carolina beach and invite many former students and friends to join them for personal and professional discussions. Tom and I additionally stayed in phone and conference contacts on frequent occasions to discuss philosophical issues and catch up with our respective families. Although I began my research on Kantian philosophical issues, I strayed from those interests into research concerning the adjudication of issues at the interface of philosophy, science and the law to protect the public’s health. Nonetheless, although Tom admitted these issues were beyond his ken, we discussed them and I continued to learn from his work on Kantian topics that interested me and on occasion were related to my own research.
    Tom Hill made enormous contributions with his collection of work on Kant’s moral philosophy, especially emphasizing Kantian themes that contributed to contemporary moral discussions. Many will miss his philosophic insights and friendship, but he has made quite substantial philosophic contributions with his corpus of work and the students he guided. We will miss him.

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  10. Karen Stohr

    I had the great fortune of studying with Tom at Chapel Hill. I finished my dissertation in 1999, but I never stopped learning from him. Perhaps Tom’s most salient characteristic was his profound moral decency. It pervaded his philosophical work and his interactions with everyone and everything around him. He did not shy away from conflict; indeed, he could launch a devastating critique of an argument when the occasion called for it. But he did so with kindness, charity, and always with an eye toward how it could be improved. Philosophy, for Tom, was about nurturing ideas, not trampling them underfoot. It is perhaps no surprise that so many of us have been drawn to him and to his way of doing philosophy.

    One of my favorite works by Tom is an older essay in his collection, Dignity and Practical Reason. The article is titled, “Making Exceptions without Abandoning the Principle, or How a Kantian Might Think about Terrorism,” and it typifies Tom’s philosophical style. In it, he tackles a very difficult practical problem, one that poses particular challenges for Kantianism. He offers a brilliantly nuanced and sophisticated approach to the problem, with the suggestion that it is just how a Kantian *might* think about terrorism. Not ‘must’ or ‘ought’ but ‘might.’ Tom was a very wise man, an Aristotelian phronimos in my view. But he never put himself forward as giving the final word on a topic. That would have been at odds with his own intellectual humility and his conviction that philosophical progress is gradual, subject to revising and rethinking, and most importantly, something we do together.

    To be one of Tom’s students was to be treated as a partner in intellectual inquiry, even when it was patently obvious that one of those partners was wildly underqualified compared to the other. He had high standards, particularly when it came to charitable interpretation of whatever we were reading or writing about. But he lived by those standards himself, granting us that same charity and being unfailingly respectful of our efforts to say something sensible. Tom treated everyone in his orbit as a fellow member of the kingdom of ends. I was a convert to Kantianism, and it was Tom’s moral character that converted me as much as anything he wrote.

    I realize that I am portraying Tom as somewhat of a saint, and he would have been the first to object to that characterization of himself. (I can visualize him frowning at the very idea.) Tom never expected perfection of anyone, but he was always hopeful that we might all manage to do just a little bit better. In the later part of his life, Tom became especially interested in the concept of appreciation. I know he had more to say about it than he had time or energy to write, but one thing that is true of Tom is that he himself knew how to appreciate things. Philosophy, of course, but also birds, music, good meals, the stray dogs and cats that found their way into the Hill household. Most of all, though, Tom knew what it mean to value and appreciate people. He wrote about it and he lived it. I grieve Tom’s death, but I am so grateful for having had the opportunity to participate in his beautiful life.

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  11. Robert N. Johnson

    I didn’t intend to write a dissertation on Kant’s ethics. But I took a seminar from Tom and gradually it became clear that would be what I wanted to do. I’d never experienced the kind of mentorship Tom gave his students. And, as many others will say as well, he lived the ethical views he espoused. To know Tom was to see first-hand the embodiment of what respect for persons means. He was truly one of the finest people I have ever known. While I was writing the dissertation, I would meet with him each week to discuss what I’d written. He would hand over pages and pages of hand-written comments from his yellow legal pads. The amount of effort he would put into discussing what one was working on was truly mind-boggling. I will miss him terribly and will mourn the loss for a long time.

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  12. Daniel Moseley

    I first met Tom around 2002. I was a graduate student in Philosophy at UVA and dating someone who was in graduate school at UNC. When I would drive to Chapel Hill to visit, I would occasionally drop by the Philosophy Department to talk with some of the amazing faculty whose work I had read and admired. Tom was welcoming and generous with his time. He kindly offered to let me sit in, as a tourist, for some sessions of one of his graduate seminars and an undergraduate course on the History of Ethics. He also patiently listened to some of my critiques of Kantianism and showed me how confused and ignorant I was in a manner that was not bullying or condescending.

    I got to know Tom better when I arrived as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at UNC-CH in 2010. Once again, he was generous with his time and we would often chat. He had wonderful stories about his time at Oxford during the era of ordinary language philosophy, about philosophy at UCLA in the 1970s, and about exchanges with Jeffrie Murphy and Herbert Morris on punishment.

    He also attended some meetings of the UNC Philosophy and Psychiatry Research Group that I co-organized with Gary Gala. At one session when he was present we discussed his essay “Self-Regarding Suicide: A Modified Kantian View.” I remember him saying that he had not considered the practical implications of his arguments for psychiatry and medicine, and that he wished that he had the time to work it out. He was supportive of those meetings and encouraged the practical/applied direction that my work was taking.

    He also provided thorough and insightful feedback on some of my manuscripts. Each time he offered trenchant criticisms of my arguments and writing style, but offered helpful suggestions about how to improve the work. I was never officially his student, and I was a transitory and junior member of the department. He offered supererogatory mentorship and keen lessons about philosophy and writing that I will not forget.

    “Social Snobbery and Human Dignity” is one of my favorite essays by Tom. In it he distinguishes snobbery from the vices it resembles (conceit, cruelty and injustice) and he distinguishes various types of snobbery (snobbery of class, of talent, of achievement, even of moral standing). He contends that what’s morally objectionable about snobs is how they sort people as honorable or contemptible, insiders and outsiders, in a way that does not respect human dignity. It is not surprising that one of the least pretentious philosophers in the business wrote one of the best essays out there on the vice of looking down on others.

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